I’m sharing this from my Substack ruminations for the day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about worldbuilding and scene-setting lately, in other people’s works, but especially in my own. Because I write literary speculative fiction, I tend to think of worldbuilding in terms of the underlying philosophical, metaphysical, and moral questions it raises. How can I do this without coming across as preachy? I hate being bludgeoned by an author’s loudly stated and embarrassingly obvious points of view—especially when they aren’t my own. Actually, I hate it just as much when someone uses a megaphone to blast out points of view that are my own.

So how do I present differing and meaningful world views of the true, the good, and the beautiful—or the false, the cruel, and the ugly—without insulting the reader? The most obvious answer is to let my characters speak and act for themselves, and to almost always have some doubt about where they stand. The less dogmatic and the more doubtful, the better.

Basically, just let the good guys and the bad guys and everyone else in between be like real people. The greatest compliment I get from my readers is that they come to care about my villains even though some of them do truly awful things. It shows me that I’ve accomplished something important. I’ve made them into three-dimensional human beings. Likewise, I’m pleased when someone says that some of the good guys are sometimes a bit uncomfortable to be around.

I was asked recently what my greatest fear about publishing is, and my response was, “Pissing everyone off.” But, as I thought more about it, I came to the conclusion that it was OK to tick my readers off, so long as it wasn’t everyone all the time. The books that have had the most impact on my life, on some level, annoyed me, made me uncomfortable, and forced me to look at the great questions of good and evil in radically new ways. I was grateful for that, not because I was converted, but because I was given the chance to look at the universe from a new perspective and through a different set of eyes.